Tuesday, December 14, 2010

There ain't nobody here but us chickens



The chickens have been moved into their new digs for about two weeks now.  There was, as one might expect, a bit of a kerfuffle over being moved, but they seem quite happy in their bigger space and to be enjoying their roosts.  Infuriatingly, I lost the photos of Tres' construction (just one of what I'm sure will be many digital goof ups on my part), but you can still see the finished product.  


Unfortunately, their move coincided with about a week and a half of very wintry weather, so despite having access to the outside for the first time, they haven't been very inclined to get out there.  Luckily, the snow finally melted and we had a beautiful sunny day yesterday, which encouraged the first exploring we've seen.  Considering that they've only seen the inside of a box and two small buildings thus far, it must blow their little minds (to be fair, I have serious doubts about the existence of much mind in there at all, but that's another matter . . .).


the one on the left looks weird and
contorted,but she's just taking a dust bath

I know this has been pretty chicken-heavy lately.  There should be news to report on the home-front soon and, after Christmas, I'll post about what I've been up to around here lately.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Girl, you'll be a woman soon

It's crazy how quickly the chickens are growing and changing.  Here are two photos I was going to post on the 7th:



And here's what they look like today:



Pretty soon, they'll be ready to move outside.  We also downsized our flock a bit (it was surprisingly hard to let them go, even though 26 was WAY too many birds for us).  We sold 16, leaving 10 for us.  Just right.

Monday, November 22, 2010

Say, what's in this drink?

Well, it's apparently winter here now:





If you're wondering, yes, the ace does freeze
when it gets cold enough

Tres had the foresight to start winterizing the shop early last month and I'm feeling especially grateful for that today.  The insulation definitely goes a long way and he sealed up the garage doors, so we're pretty airtight.  We bought and installed (well, Tres installed) a pellet stove and it makes things quite comfortable in here (plus, it's super nice to snuggle up around after dinner).  The cat is a BIG fan.  


With the advent of cooler weather, we've also started to bust out our seasonal recipes.  We had early Thanksgiving with both of our immediate families a few weekends ago (I highly recommend this, by the way; not only was it fun, but we'll get two Thanksgiving dinners!) and contributed one of our favorite winter libations: gløgg.  I made the syrup  (simple syrup, stewed with your choice of whole, wintry spices - for this batch, I used cinnamon sticks, cloves, allspice, fennel, and cardamom and then added a little vanilla once it cooled a bit) here before we left and we added it to each person's cup of warm red wine individually (about 3 tsp. per mug).


I also tried my hand at making cranberry sauce for the first time.  As it turns out, it's super easy and it was surprisingly popular.  I'll definitely be making it again.  I adapted this recipe http://www.food.com/recipe/spiced-cranberry-sauce-108905.



There is forthcoming news on the house front as well, but I'm going to wait to share until the last few details have been confirmed.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

In just seven days. . .

Well, they're not fully into awkward pullet stage yet, but they're definitely on their way.  Their feathers are starting to come in and they must be about twice as big as they were when they arrived.  They're also getting more accustomed to us, often coming over to explore of their own accord when we put our hands close.  Who knows, we just might have socialized hens yet.


Food, glorious food

As I mentioned last week, there's been a lot of food preservation going on around here lately.  Let's begin with Tres' sauerkraut.  This is our second year making sauerkraut and let me just say, despite being raised a good German and having really enjoyed sauerkraut previously, there is NOTHING that compares with homemade sauerkraut.  Man, it is just so good.  At any rate, here's the deal.  We bought about 50 pounds of cabbage and Tres got to work - a food processor is a great tool for doing this on a big scale, but a grater would work fine too, especially if you were making less.  Next, the shredded cabbage goes into a crock (or a 5 gallon food-grade bucket in our case - another instance of re-purposing beer brewing equipment) with salt and gets mashed until it's submerged in its own juice.  Then, it's just a matter of weighing it down and waiting until it tastes ready.  This year, we let it ferment for two weeks before canning it and ended up with 20 quarts.









Next up were apples.  We headed to our local orchard (the same place we picked peaches and nectarines  over the summer) and picked 83 pounds of Fujis.  I tackled applesauce.  First, I cored, peeled, and sliced the apples - thank you Sandy for the handy dandy apple peeler , it sure makes things easier (although I would advocate buying the model that clamps onto your surface, as the suction cup has given out on ours after a couple of seasons).  I heated the sliced apples in a pot, with just a little water,  until they broke apart with a spoon, then I ground them with the grinder attachment for our mixer.  I use the grinder because I like my applesauce chunky, but when I made applesauce with kids at school, I used a food mill, which gives you the smooth texture that you find with most commercial apple sauces.  After grinding, I added cinnamon and nutmeg, heated the apples back up,  and canned them (I didn't add any sugar because the Fujis were very sweet, a little too sweet for me actually, but most people add sugar to taste as they're reheating).  After several slow batches, reheating in a pot, I took a cue from my brilliant husband and heated the ground apples up in the crock pot.  While it takes longer, you can heat more at one go and you don't have monitor them to keep them from burning.  When all was said and done, I ended up with 21 quarts of apple sauce.  Tres used a similar technique to make apple butter, adding brown sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, allspice, cloves, cardamom, and ginger to his ground apples, before cooking them in the crock pot until they had reduced in volume by 1/2, about 20 hours.  One full crock pot yielded 7 pints.





We've been wanting to store root vegetables over the winter for a few years now, but either haven't gotten enough from our garden or haven't had a good space in which to store them.  This year, we decided to experiment with a root cellar (with the hopes that this will be a method we can continue to use and improve upon in the future).  You might recognize the barrel as the tank from our former shower (it used to hold strawberry kiwi flavored syrup and was purchased at the local junk/hardware shop).  Tres sawed off the top, put a piece of leftover plywood in the middle to separate our items, and filled it with straw.  We bought 25 pounds of beets, 25 pounds of carrots, and 50 pounds of potatoes at the farmer's market and filled the barrel, then buried it in the dirt and put the lid back on the top.  Yay for fresh vegetables in the winter!



Sunday, October 24, 2010

Sing a new song, chiquitita

Last week, Tres set up the pump house with a heating light, thermometer (so we could track the temperature, based on the light's height), feeder, and water dispenser.  


Our chicks arrived at the post office at 6:30 on Wednesday morning - twenty-six balls peeping balls of fluff (twenty-five barred rock and one free "mystery fancy breed").  It is a very strange thing to ride with a (relatively small - maybe 12" x 12") box full of peeping baby chickens on your lap.  They are ridiculously cute and pretty funny right now, curious about everything and noisy.

giant water dish and
(more diminuative) feeding tray


sly eyes

I did not, regrettably, catch any of them jumping in this video, but you do get to hear them peeping, which is about my favorite thing right now.  Stay tuned for the awkward phase!

Try a tomato, Plato

We're in full food preservation mode around here right now, as lots of fruits and vegetables are in their prime and our farmer's market is only open for another week.  My parents came up a few weekends ago and we canned tomatoes together.  Despite this being our third year preserving tomatoes, Tres and I have not been stellar record-keepers and had no real recollection of how many we had purchased in years past.  Tres estimated 60 pounds, so we doubled that for this year and headed home from the farmer's market with our bounty.

half of our purchase


The first step was washing and blanching the tomatoes, so that we could peel them easily (the frying basket from the turkey deep fryer we use for brewing beer lends itself well to this job).




boiling water for blanching
(our stove inside is much too small for this pot)


Next, we peeled and quartered the tomatoes, then put them back in a pot and heated them over the stove until they were very juicy and could easily be crushed with a wooden spoon (turns out the quartering step was actually unnecessary, as they break down plenty during this step).  Then, it was time to can.  We filled each jar (which had been warming up in a hot water bath) with tomatoes and a bit of lemon juice (to assure proper acidity), capped it, and then canned them, 7 quarts at a time, in the pressure canner.

one batch peeled and quartered

Mom heating the tomatoes (it got late) 


our jar filling area 
(aka the top of the washer and dryer)

All in all, it doesn't sound too bad and it wasn't.  The more tomatoes we processed, the better we got.  Unfortunately, the canner cannot be hurried in the time it takes to heat up, pressurize, and cool down, so we were limited as to how quickly we could work.  It also turns out that 120 pounds is a LOT of tomatoes - we made 54 quarts, which was 8 batches in the canner.  This took most of two days, with very little downtime, but we're very happy with the results.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Guess what we ordered today?

It's early to rise and early in the sack. . .

A seed salesman recently asked me whether I was a "country girl."  I answered indirectly, saying that I was learning a lot, etc., but it did bring me again to something I've been considering for a bit now.  In all honesty, I'm quite certain  - having lived rurally for only a few months - that I am not a country girl (as yet).  Will I be?  Do I want to be?  I fully embrace and am really excited about our change in lifestyle and becoming part of our community here, but growing up in Portland and one of its suburbs and living as a transplant in New York and Seattle have certainly been formative parts of my life and identity. . .  On the other hand, I've also been lately struck  by how strong the human impulse to fit in and integrate with a community can be (while I do tend to have a bit of a "don't follow the crowd impulse," I recognize that a sense of belonging is a nice thing).  I don't have any conclusions or great epiphanies, it's just something I've been thinking and wondering about lately.


The photo above is from my job a few weeks ago - I'm pretty sure I shouldn't have enjoyed driving a forklift as much as I did.  It was totally sweet. 

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Move it on over

My apologies for the lack of updating around here.  I have been helping clean onion seeds at Tres' work and am still trying to figure out how to do other things too.  Pretend this entry was posted about six weeks ago.


That's when we loaded up a 26 foot moving truck (inexplicably, the largest size was also the cheapest) with all of our belongings from Seattle and brought them out here.  It was by far the easiest, least painful/stressful move ever.  We actually took the time to organize, pack, and clean just about everything up before we came out here, so moving our stuff was just a matter of trying to be smart about the order in which we loaded everything up.  That said, it still took us several hours, punctuated by several trips to the hardware store for replacement stove pans (why, WHY do they make them in different depths?  Is there even the slightest justifiable reason for this?), the one matter I had not addressed before leaving Seattle.  Luckily,  just as we were starting to slow down, we were mercifully aided by our friends Jeff and Amalia, who then accompanied us back home.


the cat explores our moving truck

Unpacking was saved for the next day, when Tres' dad also joined us.  Quickly realizing that we were going to need some sort of organizational system (namely, places to put things we would like to use over the next several months), we headed out for some cinder blocks and boards and made shelves along 3 sections of the walls.  Next, we unpacked the boxes of things we knew we would want to access immediately (non-perishable food items, kitchen utensils, clothes, records, stereo, etc.) and put them in their new homes.  Finally, we moved the rest in, stacking the boxes on pallets (thank you, Pro-Build!) according to usefulness/need.  Everything ended up fitting with surprising efficiency, leaving us with lots of room left over and easy access to pretty much everything.  Here's how it looked when we'd finished (also before the second window was cut and installed, you may note):





In the ensuing weeks, we have continued to move things around, unpack more, and otherwise live and work in here.  The photo below shows some of the reorganization and additions in the back:

kitties enjoy furniture and boxes

There has been other stuff going on and I have two other entries started, so I will do my best to get some more posted soon!

Sunday, August 29, 2010

You make bath time lots of fun

Up until now, the shop has looked like this inside.



the wall partially insulated - you also see my
favorite addition to the shop, our  fridge

With electricity installed, our next step was to "finish" the inside - putting up the rest of the insulation, covering it with Sheetrock (bare insulation and cats with too much time on their hands seemed a poor combination), putting in the windows, hooking up the rest of our appliances, and plumbing in the sink and shower. Tres' dad was on his way back up to help us and to bring the other appliances and fixtures, so our job was to get everything we would need ready. We rounded up the rest of our supplies (more PVC, the tub, and a tankless water heater) and then, while Tres continued to work on the pipes, I cut and put in the frames for the windows.


sawing window frames


It took Tres' dad just a few hours to put up the rest of the insulation and then we were on to Sheetrock. After he carefully notched out spaces for the outlets/fitting into the metal uprights, we fitted each piece onto the wall and he attached it on the sides.


screwing on the first sheet

Next, I screwed each sheet on, making five rows of five screws each.  I am not shall we say. . . adept with an electric screwdriver (nor with non-electric models, for that matter), so this felt like a major accomplishment.  He was also sure to save the most fun task of all - screwing in the bottom of each sheet - just for me.   Suffice to say, he now knows most of the colorful phrases in my vocabulary.


screwing on Sheetrock


one bay covered in Sheetrock

Once the Sheetrock was up, we needed to waterproof the walls around the kitchen/bathroom area.  Tres' dad taped, mudded, and primed the walls, then I painted the edges and he and Tres took turns painting them.

primed and edged

walls painted

While I worked in the field and office with Tres for the rest of the week, his dad installed the sink and counter, hooked up the shower, and plumbed the whole mess.  It was definitely a major job and we're so grateful for all of his hard work.

setting in the sink

 indoor shower

Tres finished tweaking the shower on Saturday (adding a showerhead, etc.) and I helped him rig up a shower curtain, then: indoor showers. . . with hot water.  It was, in a word, amazing.  

that first shower feeling

Tres has been working on installing the windows a little every day after work and he finished yesterday!  In retrospect, it would have been easier to do during construction, rather than having to detach the siding, trim it, slide in the metal framing and the window, then put it all back together, but now one is done and it's lovely.  Just one to go!

first window
trimmed sheet metal lends itself to oh-so-many uses